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From: Hugh Niven <>
Subject: [SCT-INV] John Stuart Blackie 1809-1895
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 16:36:40 -0500

GAELIC SOCIETIES



HIGHLAND DEPOPULATION



AND LAND LAW REFORM



Inaugural Address To The Gaelic Society, Perth

October 7, 1880



By John Stuart Blackie

Chief of the Society

And Professor of Greek in The University of Edinburgh



God Created the Earth;

He formed it to be inhabited.

Isa. xlv.18.





Edinburgh: David Douglas

1880





THE DEPOPULATION OF THE HIGHLANDS.



There are three countries in Europe, inhabited by three distinct and well-marked types of people, which have always moved me with deep sorrow, as stamped with a common impress of social misfortune. These three are Ireland, Poland, and the Scottish Highlands. The type of misfortune which has overtaken these people is simply that of being overwhelmed by an element of foreign conquest or superior culture, without being entirely assimilated; and overwhelmed in such a way that the elements of jar, and fret, and ineffective protest still remain in the mass, displaying themselves at intervals, either in violent outbreaks of hostility, or in curses, not loud but deep, muttered against the unwelcome intruders. What the Highlanders were in the days of their glory, when the glens were peopled with a numerous tenantry, remarkable among the peasantry of Europe for energy and enterprise, for courage and for character, is matter of history. What they are now, when many of the glens are de!
solate and dispeopled, when most of the high-minded and stout-hearted of the population have reluctantly bid adieu to a country that knew not how to value their services; when scarcely one now is to be found in some menial position, where hundreds used to brush the heather with a manly tread, and rejoice in the feeling that they cultivated with the sweat of their brow the land which their fathers had purchased for the clan by their dear hearts' blood- all this humiliation of the noblest and best element in our Scottish population is matter of fact, which a man must be altogether blind not to see, and altogether hard and callous not to lament as one of the greatest of national misfortunes which has overtaken us in these latter days. But, though this humiliation is a fact which cannot be denied, and a fact, no doubt, in the main, embodying a verdict of history which cannot be reversed, the existence of Gaelic Societies in various parts of Scotland seems a sufficient indication!
that the Highlanders, though humiliated and degraded, are not extinguished - that, if they are destined to die, like all mortal things, they mean to die hard. And this resolution is both wise in itself, and the worthy outcome of that nobility of ancestral retrospect for which the Highlanders have always been distinguished. There are base natures, no doubt, which are willing, for the sake of filthy lucre, or worldly advancement in some shape, to blot out all the glorious memories which cling to the name of Highlander; and there are others, not a few, whom grave necessity compels to cling to the skirts of the unfeeling master who has trampled them in the mud; but every noble nature north of the Grampians, and every man who has manhood to assert, will be most forward to cherish those living or written records of a glorious past, from which the present has derived all the best inspiration it possesses to make the most of a possible future. It is difficult to kill a people. Cen!
tralisation, no doubt, and officialism, the far-reaching arms of commercial speculation, and the swift-travelling contagion of a locomotive machinery, are powers which do a most effective business in the way of obliterating local types, and establishing a uniform monotony of superficial polish wherever they appear. But Nature loves variety; and there is a certain manly instinct of local independence in our British constitution which is apt to kick stoutly against the tyranny of Metropolitan invasion. I have no doubt, therefore, that Gaelic Societies in Scotland, at the present moment, have a distinct and well-marked sphere of legitimate action; and, if they will in very deed buckle themselves to serious action in the practical world, and not content themselves with vapouring about Ossian, whom they never read, and eulogizing Duncan Ban, whom they do not sing, I have no doubt they will do good service. But they must put their hand to the plough energetically and help themselv!
es. The Sassenach, they may depend upon it, will not help them: his mission in the main, he conceits himself, is to override and to extinguish the poor Highlander with his own superior civilization. God helps no man who is not stoutly resolved to help himself. For myself, the little that I had opportunity to do for the preservation of the language and literature of the Celtic peoples, and especially of our brave Highlanders, is already done; and I am done with it. To-day, the honourable duty has been assigned to me of saying a few words, by way of inauguration, to the Gaelic Society of Perth; and I will do so with the strong feeling that a word is only a word, and, unless it be followed by some distinct stroke of action, utterly worthless. What course of action it may be advisable for you to pursue is for yourselves to determine: you are Highlanders, and you ought to know your own aspirations and your own capabilities better than I can tell you; but having now, for a period !
of more than thirty years, lived more or less among the Highlanders, and taken, as any man with a human heart must do, a sorrowful interest in their misfortunes, I will venture to put forth one or two practical suggestions such as, at the present moment, may seem seasonable.



In the first place, however, it will be necessary to cast a retrospective glance over the sad sequence of misfortunes and blunders which abolished the clan system with all its admirable social steam and social cement, without substituting any thing in its place, rather leaving a void where there had been fullness, and inoculating with the virus of a systematic selfishness the veins of a society which had been bound together by the strong ties of mutual esteem and regard. First, then, let us ask what the clan system was, and wherein consisted the great virtue which enabled it to maintain a numerous, sturdy, and serviceable population in districts where not a single human being is now to be found, except a game-keeper for some English aristocrat or London plutocrat, or a shepherd and a dairymaid to represent a Titanic dealer in wool and mutton living in Dumfries or Kirkcudbright. The word clan means a child; so the clan system was simply the type of social organism in which th!
e members of society were bound together, as brother to brother, under the leadership of a common father. This idea is, as you will lightly see, a legacy from the patriarchal times; and not bad times these were- though without gas and steam-engines, and telegrams and cash accounts- as the names of Abraham and Job and not a few other mighty men in Bible history largely testify. In fact, the clan system, as a form of government, was not only not a bad system, but, in respect of the moral cement which held different classes of society together, it was the best possible system that ever has been or ever will be devised. Of course, those who are accustomed to look back on what they call the dark ages with contempt, and who believe blindly in the modern commercial system, and the progress of the world by mechanical dexterities and material accumulations, will not accept this; but it is true nevertheless. The moral element in society is the blood, and the blood is the life. Every s!
ociety is progressive or retrogressive- in the highest sense of the word progress- only in proportion as the moral bond which holds the different classes together is becoming stronger or weaker; and this is a bond with which cash payments and bankers' accounts have nothing at all to do; love and mutual esteem growing out of kindly social relations are the only elements of which this moral bond can consist. Now, as it is a matter both of public history and of personal experience that this bond did exist and assert itself under the clan system by deeds of devotion and fidelity, generosity and self-sacrifice, unsurpassed in the annals of the human race, it follows plainly that, so far as this one true cement of the social edifice is concerned, the clan system, within its own limits, was the best possible. One only defect it had; it had a tendency to weaken as the circle of its action widened, and was thus less fitted for a great kingdom than for a small province. It is remarkab!
le however, and greatly to the honour of the clan system in Scotland, that, though the clansmen sometimes preferred the private interest of their chief to the public service of the Sovereign, under common circumstances, as ample pages of history show, their loyalty to the Crown was as remarkable as their fidelity to their chiefs. Other objections so largely brought against the clan system are worthless- as that it fostered perpetual wars, jealousies, and strifes; and that revenge and robbery were practiced on a large scale, both by the clans amongst themselves and in their raids against the Lowlanders. The feuds which were kept up among the clans were the natural product of the times, and as such neither more nor less reprehensible than the great wars between the nations of Europe which prevailed at the same time; and, when we consider what false and lawless men sometimes held the helm of State in those days, and how apt to be partial to the party who got the ear of the king!
, we shall not be inclined to pass a severe censure on men who had learned to hold their estates by the right of their good swords rather than by the parchment of a juggling lawyer, or the word of honour of a dishonourable king. AS little am I disposed to find fault with the absolute authority the clan system placed in the hands of the chief, or the father of the family. This authority, no doubt, might be abused sometimes: but in the main it was beneficially exercised, and, like the patria potestas of the ancient Romans, was the mother of an admirable discipline and a firm consolidation. One great merit of the clan system deserves special prominence. The feudal system and our modern commercial system combined, place the peasants and the country altogether at the mercy of a proprietor who knows no social ties between the holder and cultivator of the land- a person to whom the idea of loving his people is simply a phrase of silly sentimentality, and who acknowledges no duty in!
a landed aristocracy but that of gathering in rents in the easiest possible way, and with the least possible regard to the happiness of the human beings who may happen to be under his wing. To the clan chief the idea of dissociating the land from the people who lived on it was as strange as to a father would be the idea of disinheriting his children. The spirit of the family system taught that the members of the family had a right to be supported by the head of the family, or, at all events, to be allowed to support themselves by honest labour on part of the family inheritance. By the clan law, indeed, the class of persons whom we now call small tenants or crofters were, in a sense, co-proprietors- that is, though they paid dues or services to the chief as men now pay rent, they could not be dispossessed, or at least as matter of fact very rarely were dispossessed. By the consuetudinary law of the district they were perpetual tenants of the land which they cultivated, and w!
hich they had gained for the chief by the strokes of their good claymores. Hence, though there might have been in these times occasional misery from bad seasons and bad management, conjoined with over-population, such monstrous unsocial and inhuman proceedings as wholesale clearances and depopulations and ejections of independent men for the sake of the culture of wild or tame beasts were never heard of. No doubt, therefore, whatever might have been the special defect of the clan system, or the general evils of the medieval period, the state of the Highlands in the days when M'Donalds and the M'Gregors were mighty in the land, was a paradise compared to the state of desolation in which it now for the most part lies.



Our next inquiry is, How did this system come to be overthrown, and what sort of a system was substituted in its place? The beginning of this great change, and, as it has turned out for a great part of the Highlands, great evil, was the brilliant blunder of 1745; and this political blunder again arose out of a misfortunate attaching to the Highlanders from their remote situation and distance from the center of political life and social movements. The fidelity to the head of the clan, which was the main support of the clan system, transferred to the head of the State, became loyalty- and loyalty so generous and so unsuspecting that it gave itself in pure self-sacrifice to the support of a hereditary dynasty, after that dynasty had, by repeated acts, proved itself unworthy of the confidence reposed in it. Even a father may be lawfully bound and restrained by a son if he attempts to kill or even to beat a mother; and a government such as that of the Stuarts, which had systemati!
cally conspired to destroy personal and religious liberty in this country, had forfeited all right to the loyal adherence of its subjects. But the Highlanders, partly from over-strained notions of the Royal prerogative, partly from being ignorant to the full extent of the machinations of the Stuart Court and family, determined to stand by the discrowned monarch, and maintain him in his forfeited rights; and, by this great mistake, after a few brilliant flashes of success, acquired for themselves the permanent character of impracticable politicians and contumacious rebels. This was bad enough. Their noblest virtue was thus, by sad social necessity, construed into a crime; and they were in every way treated as a dangerous, rather than as a useful and powerful element, in the body politic. The gloom which this sad affair and its inevitable consequence threw on the great mass of the clansmen was doubly felt by the chiefs. By the Disarming Act, and the Act

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